Big Brother, you have been evicted, please leave the channel 4 schedule. Tonight it will. Big Brother stared as a social experiment 10 years ago. A few years later we all forgot that the supposed peril of Airstrip One was the lack of privacy. Instead thousands of us auditioned to be cast under the eye of Big Brother. The desire to be fame was so rampant that the Big Brother house became a stage for any wannabe celebrity to become a household name or any washed up celebrity to regain that status. A flood of reality TV followed centered around the sacred status of the celebrity. The legacy is a generation of children with vain ambitions of importance in the eyes of others. ”Being a celebrity” has topped a list of what 10 year old believe to be “the most important thing in the world”, “good looks” and “being rich” came second and third respectively. In the last decade more and more of us wanted to be on camera.
At the same time the labour government was stripping back our civil liberties citing terrorists out to attack us. With CCTV we became the most watched nation on the face of the earth. We couldn’t have had much of a problem with it because we reelected Tony Blair in 2005. Were we that scared that were willing to swap our ideals for perceived safety? Was that what the terrorists would have wanted?
There is more then just an Orwellian connection between the two. I believe both stem form the inflated sense of self importance that politicians and the media have given to the public, it is in the nature of both to exaggerate the importance of your opinion and the treat the can protect you from. People care enough about us to be interested in every trivial detail, and others to want us dead. In reality few politicians care if most individuals live or die, never mind what you think. In reality far more people die from smoking and driving then terrorism. However these misconceptions are perpetuated by every sensationalist column inch given to talentless reality tv stars and relatively harmless and inactive terrorist cell’s.
Now we have a generation scared of the almost inevitable anonymity of everyday life as well as the massively over exaggerated threat of tourism. Our ego’s have won the victories over ourselves. We love Big Brother.
